Sunday, May 5

Rudyard Kipling's message to Eddie Vedder

Eddie tripped and fell in Italy and elegantly stood up and kept going.

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Excerpts from the famous poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling who "was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected Kipling deeply." (here)